NIH/NIGMS R01 Grant

Yuan Jiang has been awarded a four year, $770K R01 grant by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences for the project "Network-based statistical methods to decode interactions within microbiomes". Duo Jiang and Thomas Sharpton are co-investigators on this grant.

This project will develop statistical methods built on conditional dependencies that disentangle biological interactions from marginal correlations to produce mechanistically and evolutionarily relevant network models of how microbes interact with one another and their host. As a result, this work will produce knowledge critical to long-term efforts to manage and engineer microbiomes with the goal of eliciting specific clinical or physiological processes. This work can also profoundly influence industry efforts to develop microbiome-related products such as clinical diagnostics, novel drugs, and therapeutic probiotics.